Symbiont 'Smart Securities' technology secures backing

First Published 10th June 2015

Symbiont secures a $1.25 million round of funding from key financial industry leaders, including Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of NYSE Euronext.

Duncan Niederauer, Symbiont board of directors

"Symbiont is bridging the gap between Wall Street and the emerging blockchain ecosystem."

New York - Symbiont, the provider of
Smart Securities on the blockchain, has secured $1.25M of seed
funding from influential financial market leaders. Early
investors include Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the NYSE
Euronext; Matt Andresen, founder of the Island ECN and former
co-head of trading at Citadel; Getco, LLC founders Dan Tierney
and Stephen Schuler through Wicklow Capital; Scott Carmilani,
Chairman and CEO of Allied World Assurance Company; and Celeridem
FinTech Fund. A 'Series A' round of institutional investment is
expected to close in Q3 2015.

The new company aims to eliminate many of the inefficiencies and
opaqueness that have developed on Wall Street by utilizing the
speed and security of cryptographic distributed ledgers known as
blockchains to enable faster markets that are more efficient, and
exhibit lower costs with increased liquidity, transparency, and
security.

By making programmable versions of traditional securities
available on a distributed ledger, the platform seeks to allow
institutional and retail users to issue, trade and process a
range of instruments more efficiently in a single, global,
decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer financial network.

"Symbiont is bridging the gap between Wall Street and the
emerging blockchain ecosystem. It's an exciting, timely and
much-needed development for the long-term health of the markets,"
said Niederauer, Managing Member of 555 Capital and a member of
the Symbiont Board of directors, for whom this is the first
investment in the bitcoin ecosystem.

"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage this
previously unimaginable technology for the greater good of
investors, financial institutions, and global financial markets,"
said Mark Smith, co-founder and CEO of Symbiont. "The blockchain
not only has the potential to democratize markets but to drive
down the cost of doing business across all sectors."